Category Archives: is it upon us

This year, like years in the past LAB’s where in huge demand at VMworld. VMworld Labs, the aftermath has the numbers.

” * Lab Cloud served up 30 lab topics. In 2009 we had 21 lab topics to select from. We had 480 lab seats, with 44 hours of labs resulting in a total of 21120 total lab hours!* Every hour Lab Cloud was creating (deploying) and destroying (un-deploying) approximately 4000 Virtual Machines* Lab Cloud delivered 15,344 labs. In 2009 we delivered approximately 4500 labs in total.* Lab Cloud deployed a total of 145,097 VMs”

So with the huge interest of lab’s, it got me thinking. VMware is pushing cloud, Why isn’t there more Lab on Demand access? Why doesn’t VMware, offer customer’s access to on demand labs? Something to show off a product like vCD. Show us what VMware can do via the Cloud. Why can’t resellers that currently offer customer’s lab access in house, offer it via the cloud?

What do I mean by on demand? I mean a website, listing the labs, with registration, with help available via staff if needed.

People want to try products out, go through the configuration of the products in non Product environments. But budget’s hamper this, and distance makes it hard to vista your local reseller every time you want lab access.

On the other side of things, Think how the VMUG could use something like on demand Lab Access to allow user group members to either shadow a VMUG leader, etc.

Now, what about architecture challenges? Anyone want to come up with some design examples?

What about other vendor’s, is this the year for them to have on demand lab access? I would like to see someone step up the game.